Yes.... Yes it has been known for years now, and there is no way to track it or gain real evidence on it, because the majority of people that use this method do it with tools they have built themselves and they run on their phones by sweeping the AH site, those searches are not connected to a game accounr or forum accout, they're completely anonymous and can't be stopped without requiring a login to search the AH site. To do so (by many) has been deemed to be more of an annoyance than to just deal with the items rarity on the AH, thus many shells and groups that acquire the items, actively limit the release of those items for public sale. Most of the groups that get these items know crafters that they can sell to in bulk, or they have crafters that can do the synths for them. These tools go way back like 4-5 years ago when the AH was basically empty on mats, because people were selling everything to guild npc's for instant profit. I do not support the use of those tools, but at the same time I do not support locking AH searches behind a login. This is a rare case where I do support Nepotism as an appropriate response. Seriously though, if you see this kind of thing happening, just educate ppl on the NPC value of items, I doubt anyone in it for what little gil they're selling these things for, would even put it on the AH if they knew the NPC value.

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!!! Surprise !!!
~not a noob~

To be fair, I've bought stacks of an item that is clearly being scripted off the AH from the person.. because ya know? Why not?

but... I think the AH site could be like 2 hours delayed to give at least a chance to people that don't feel like cheating.

and also: to be clear, I couldn't care less about the shit being NPC'd for a small profit. It's being done with much more impactful and valuable materials though

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yikes

The ah current stock on the website being delayed by about 2 hours would be a great way to even the playing field on competitive mats. No idea how possible that really is though.

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Incase Nas doesn't want to add a time delay he may be able to reduce the amount of data scraped by requiring players to authenticate with their forum account before accessing the AH website. The authentication would also enable him to monitor/log Auction house API requests at the account level instead of IP....pending he does this already.

That's a good idea, even if it's only 30 min or so it'd help alot

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!!! Surprise !!!
~not a noob~